DB charset in CI 1.6.0

[eluser]Référencement Google[/eluser]
I am using french with characters like é à è ü etc... and that is working perfectly with CI 1.6 theses characters aren't encoded with é or things like that, they are stored directly as is in the DB, but of course all the production environment is set with UTF-8 encoding, this mean the DB, the tables and table fields, the PHP headers, the HTML headers, AND the pages in PHP are also created in UTF-8 (I mean I am using the option of my IDE to create files as UTF-8).